WHAT MOTHERS REALLY WANT

by Joyce Maynard

THERE WAS A big bluegrass festival coming up a short distance from our town, and my friend Erica loved bluegrass. So I invited her to come with me. It was happening, coincidentally, on Mother's Day. Erica is a mother. So am I.

She looked sad when I told her the date of the concert. She'd love to go, she said, if it was any other day. But her children would be so disappointed if she spent Mother's Day away from them.

There you have it: everything I hate most about Mother's Day. Here we have this holiday that's supposed to be set aside for honoring and celebrating the largely uncelebrated efforts of women on behalf of their children. And instead, there was my good friend--a woman who has been driving car pools and sitting on the sidelines of soccer games in freezing weather and cutting the crusts off her son's bread twice a day for the last seven years--foregoing an activity she would have loved, to make her children happy on Mother's Day.

Around our house, there was, for years, a different kind of Mother's Day problem. Long ago, my children evidently got the idea that they should provide me with breakfast in bed on Mother's Day. This would be reasonable enough, except that I don't like eating in bed. (What I don't like, actually, is sleeping in a bed filled with crumbs. And one inevitably leads to the other.) The other problem with getting breakfast in bed is that I'm an early riser and my children, on Sunday mornings at least, are not. So I was always having to go back to bed on Mother's Day morning sometime around 10:30, by which time I would probably have been up, dressed and attending to business for several hours. And then, when I was finished with the fattening muffin I didn't really want, and the scrambled eggs, and the watery coffee, I would come downstairs to find a frying pan sitting in the sink, covered with bits of dried-up egg. I had two options then: call my children and deliver speech number 43, the one about how there are no elves who appear in the night to clean our house, or save my strength and clean the pan myself. I have tried it both ways, and either one makes me cranky. All the more so if it happens on Mother's Day.

If you ask me, mothers should be celebrated and honored every single day of the year. But if that isn't going to happen, I'd actually prefer no holiday for mothers at all. It's not that I don't want recognition and presents, truthfully. It's that the recognition and presents should be more substantial.

I would like the equivalent of an Oscar. And a place to go, along the lines of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, to pick it up. And a designer dress to wear for the occasion, and jewels from Harry Winston. I would like the opportunity to compose my acceptance speech, and when I do, I will certainly remember to thank my children, without whom this award would never have been possible. If I'm going to spend the next 11 months, three weeks and six days picking up stray socks and ferrying children to friends' houses, I want to collect a little more for my trouble than breakfast in bed. Satin sheets maybe, and a maid to turn them down at night, and a chocolate on my pillow. Or, simply, a year in which I do not have to remind my sons to put the top down on the toilet seat.

The other problem with the way most of our loved ones honor us on Mother's Day has to do with what part of us they honor. For instance: I actually love to cook. But I do not want to be showered with pot holders and aprons on my special day. Other Mother's Day gifts which have less than thrilled me include a pressure cooker, an electric knife sharpener and a memo pad with a suction cup that attached to the dashboard of my station wagon, to keep my To Do list visible at all times.

One year, when my son Charlie was in second grade, his class hosted a special Mother's Day night in his classroom. Each of the students had been asked to prepare a biography of his or her mother for the event. Charlie's biography read something like this: "My mom likes to clean our house. She picks up stuff a lot. She does a good job with the laundry."

What mothers need on Mother's Day is to have their family honor all those parts of themselves that aren't about mothering. We want tap dancing lessons and purple bras from Victoria's Secret. We want leather mini skirts. We want instruction in race car driving or playing the saxophone. We want our husbands to rent us a Harley Davidson for the weekend and take off with us to some little motel without the children. We want the part of us recognized that made us mothers in the first place.

Or give us the gift of time--just plain time, with ourselves or with our women friends. Take care of the children for a night and let us have a sleep-over at the ocean with other women we love, whose husbands are also taking care of their children, so we can all get together and give each other facials and stay up all night talking. And not necessarily talking about our children--they might be surprised to know how much we have to talk about besides them.

Most particularly, give us a gift that extends beyond the 24-hour period of Mother's Day. Show us you value us and recognize what we do, even when every Hallmark store and FTD florist isn't reminding you to do it. If my children want to make me a card, I'd rather get it on some day like May 18 or September 7 or January 30. Just a regular day.

Because I'm divorced and my children were at their father's house that weekend, I spent last Mother's Day totally alone. I got up early that Sunday and went down to my favorite nursery, where I stood in line behind a couple of guilty looking guys who had left the plant-buying till the last minute and were now purchasing the largest azaleas available. For myself, I bought $50 worth of flats of flowers and seeds, and a big bag of manure. I spent the morning tilling the soil in my garden, and the afternoon planting. I played all the country music albums my children would have made fun of if they'd been around. I barbecued myself a piece of fish--a food I love and almost never prepare because my kids hate it. I soaked for a long time in the tub, and nobody hammered on the door needing to use the toilet. I called a good friend who lives in Oregon whom I hadn't talked to in nearly a year. I went to bed early and read a mystery, with a glass of wine at my side.

When my children came home that night, I was truly thrilled to see them. They piled onto the bed next to me and told me how sorry they were that they hadn't been around to make me breakfast in bed, and I tried to look regretful and told them I'd made do with half a grapefruit instead. They gave me IOUs for things like lawn-mowing and dishwasher-emptying and vacuuming. And, I am pleased to say, they performed all of these things for me cheerfully and without discussion or debate--the first time I presented the IOUs, anyway.

The truth is, I love my children more than anything. And the most precious gifts they give me never come on Mother's Day (just as the most romantic moments hardly ever occur on Valentine's Day).

But as much as I adore being a mother, I also know this: I was who I am before I had my children, and I will be that woman long after they've moved on to lives apart from me. In between the moment of giving birth to our kids and seeing them off to college, their faces loom so large for us that it's easy to lose sight of our own selves. Nobody's better than a mother at putting her own needs and desires aside in the interest of serving her family. The thing about Mother's Day is, it's a holiday that seeks to glorify that kind of self-sacrifice and promote more of the same, instead of serving to remind women to take care of themselves at least half as well as they care for their children.

That's why this Mother's Day I will be hiking over a rugged 15-mile trail to the Pacific Ocean for breakfast--a hike I take on a weekly basis, requiring a commitment of time and energy I would once have regarded as unthinkable during precious weekend time I could have been devoting to my children. And they, I have learned, can fare as well without me these days as I fare without them. They will be invited, but not required, to accompany me. Somebody else will be washing the eggs off the frying pan.

Joyce Maynard is a freelance writer in Mill Valley, California.

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